Sam smiled, looking up from his raking at the softly singing Primrose. She'd fashioned a swing out of a loop of rope and a plank leftover from the new dock, and was currently letting herself twist idly this way and that in the wind on it. She was getting so big, all the small ones were, even little Tom who would be eight on his next birthday.
It had seemed that there would never be an end to the new babies at Bag End for a good twenty years there, and with a few unfortunate exceptions each of those years had brought a boisterous new voice to the cacophony. Fourteen lads and lasses, each as bonny and fair as they should be. But then, the summer after wee Tom had come squawling into the world, a particularly unfortunate exception had knotted Rosie's insides and kept her bleeding for weeks.
They'd only just got back from visting the King and all sorts of far-off fairy places (Ruby's term for things Elanor had described over and over to her), and it seemed a terrible irony would rob Sam's children of their mother when they'd just gotten her back. "I've killed her, I've killed her," Frodo would mutter darkly, wandering about Bag End in a distraction and doing no work on his writing from day in to day out. Sam wanted to be a comfort to him, but there wasn't any comfort it his heart; only worry and dread and aching.
But Rosie had strength in her as sure as Frodo did, and came through her own black journey as close to right as he had from his. Sam and Frodo and all the children had wept and cheered and wept again, in joy and relief, and Rosie and Frodo had teased that it would be Sam's turn for a stay in bed next.
It was Frodo, though, who ended up sick and pale and fevered, just this last year passed. It was the hardest year Sam had ever lived through, and that was including all the other years that some might expect him to exclude from the statement. But the year was nearly done, and Frodo was on the mend.
There had been one night, with the children down at Marigold's just in case things ended badly, when Sam and Rosie had feared that their Frodo would be lost to them forever.
"I should have made him go. Back when El was a baby, and he was planning for it. I shouldn't have told him to stay," Rosie muttered to herself, wiping Frodo's face with a clean wet cloth.
"We both should have. He wasn't meant to stay." Sam looked out the bedroom window at the lights of the village down the hill. They hadn't lit any lamps that night, the light seemed to hurt Frodo. He hadn't been properly awake for days.
Then a rattling breath, and Sam's belly clenched as he waited, hoped, needed to hear the exhalation. It came, and Rosie let out a sigh of her own. Any gasp might be the last to come from Frodo's lungs. The night wore on, and it seemed as if dawn was waiting silently for the end, the whole night around them still and tense.
Coughing, huge sobbing breaths of air and more coughing as Frodo brought up phlegm and muck and blood-laced spit into a basin, coughing and coughing and coughing. Sam thumped his back as hard as he could bear to, afraid that fragile ribs would crack under the slightest touch.
"Water," a voice that was barely Frodo's croaked, one feeble hand holding the cup carefully and sipping with chapped lips.
"You came back," Rosie whispered, smiling through her tears.
"I wouldn't have left, even if you'd told me to," answered Frodo, and Sam and Rosie hugged him breathless just so they could hear him draw the air back in with ease.
~